The Chaos Function Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Death and Life

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  The Power

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  The Disaster

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Read More from John Joseph Adams Books

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2019 by Jack Skillingstead

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Skillingstead, Jack, 1955– author.

  Title: The chaos function / Jack Skillingstead.

  Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | “A John Joseph Adams book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018033155 (print) | LCCN 2018035449 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328527875 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328526151 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. | GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3619.K555 (ebook) | LCC PS3619.K555 C48 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033155

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover image © Shutterstock

  Author photograph © Liza Trombi

  v1.0219

  For Ruby

  My favorite daughter

  I think of the future as branching probability streams.

  —Elon Musk

  The dividing line between past, present, and future is an illusion.

  —Albert Einstein

  Because you’re a war reporter, and in the end you’re always a head above the others, right? With that hero’s aura . . .

  —Francesca Borri

  Part I

  Death and Life

  One

  Olivia Nikitas sat in the shade of an improvised awning, a canvas tarp that smelled like a dead goat. She checked her watch again, drummed her fingers nervously on the table. The hand-lettered HABIB CAFé sign hung crookedly by a couple of wire twists. Most of the buildings on both sides of the street lay in ruins, either bombed-out shells or pulverized beyond recognition. The proprietor, Habib, had dragged his coffee machine and generator into what was left of an antique shop. Olivia admired his entrepreneurial spirit. As a freelance journalist, she had been covering the carnage in Syria since 2023—six years now. The spirit of Aleppo was pretty thoroughly annihilated, so the appearance of the Habib Café, barely ten weeks into a shaky postwar era, looked like a positive development.

  Across the street a cat slipped through a mountain of wreckage, its movement so sinuous and fleeting that at first Olivia thought the cat was the shadow of something passing through the air, like a bad omen.

  She picked up her coffee, a potent Arabic blend spiced with cardamom. Holding the cup in the fingertips of both hands, she brought it to her lips. The luxury of fresh coffee equaled a minor miracle after the deprivations of war. Even in the heat, with sweat trickling from her hairline and her shirt sticking to her body, Olivia savored the scalding jolt of caffeine.

  A little girl, maybe seven years old, came running down the street, the ragged cuffs of her trousers whisking up dust. She called to the cat, grabbed a bent spine of iron rebar, and hauled herself after it, climbing a potential avalanche. Her arms and legs were bird-bone thin. Olivia winced, sitting there on her comparatively fat American ass. She put her cup down, feeling irrationally guilty for the indulgence.

  The cat darted under a slab of broken concrete. The little girl peered after it, calling, “Qetta, qetta.”  The gap was just big enough that she might be tempted to crawl after the damn thing. Olivia lifted her sweat-damp hair away from the back of her neck and looked around, hoping for some adult supervision. Good luck with that. The city was overrun with orphans. Olivia started to stand.

  In the distance, a gunshot popped.

  Olivia went rigid. Technically, hostilities had officially ended. But that wouldn’t prevent a rogue sniper from taking up position. The shot had come from the direction of the Green Zone. By now, Brian and Jodee had left and would be out in the open. Jodee Abadi was her escort into the Old City, and Brian Anker was her would-be escort into a different kind of hazardous territory: a relationship impervious to her usual strategies of detachment. Brian wasn’t the first guy to take on that mission, but he had already gotten farther than most. If Olivia’s heart was a door, then Brian was the pushy salesman who had wedged his foot in the gap when she tried to slam it in his face. For that, she resented him a little. He was good about the resentment. He was good about everything. It really pissed her off.

  Another gunshot popped. Where are you guys?

  Suddenly she felt it, the brittle substratum of the enforced peace. It could give way at any time. Foreign military forces led by the Americans barely held the city together. Soon something would break. A new insurgency, maybe. In the months since the end of the war, Olivia had gotten used to leaving her Kevlar vest in her room. She still brought her headscarf, though, even if at the moment she wore it loosely around her neck.

  Two gunshots, and Brian (and Jodee) in the open.

  By reflex, she reached for her phone, but there was no point. This district of Aleppo was a cellular dead zone.

  The sound of something scraping and sliding pulled her attention back to the girl. A broken window frame surfed down the piled debris and cracked to pieces on the street. The little girl had her broomstick arm shoved all the way to the shoulder under the concrete slab. If the slab moved, it would crush her. Olivia quickly crossed the street. “Hey, kid! Be careful.”

  From the top of the mountain of rubble, the girl looked at Olivia and pointed down. “Qetta, qetta.”

  “Yeah, I get it. Your cat is under there.”

  “Qetta.”

  Olivia looked east, willing Brian and Jodee to be there. Instead, a couple of old men crossed the street, their summer white dishdashahs seeming to float them above a haze of dust. Olivia hated that she worried about Brian. That’s what you got when you let the salesman stick his foot in the door. She should have known better.

  Olivia sighed and started climbing the rubble, muttering, “Qetta the fucking cat.”  The heat was causing her bra band to chafe, though she had caked on talcum powder. Blinking grit and stinging sweat out of her eyes, she reached the girl and put on a smile. In broken Arabic, she asked, “Where’s your mother?”  The kid stared at her with eyes too big for the bones of her face.

  “Qetta,” the g
irl said.

  “Right. Look out, kid.”

  Olivia knelt in front of the gap. She felt off-balance. The whole mass of concrete, wood, sheet metal, and glass threatened to shift without warning. Under the slab, a pair of eyes winked like green sequins. Olivia took a granola bar out of her shirt pocket and tore the wrapper. She broke off a corner and held it for the cat to smell.

  “Here, kitty.”

  The cat didn’t move.

  Hesitantly, Olivia reached under the slab. The cat crept forward, sniffing. Olivia thrust out her other hand, grabbed the cat behind the ears, and dragged it clear. Hissing and clawing, the cat wrenched out of her grip and leaped away.  The little girl didn’t even look at it. Her attention was one hundred percent on the granola bar. Olivia handed it to her. The child devoured the bar in three bites, then picked the crumbs from her shirt and sucked them off her fingers. Olivia unclipped the water bottle from her belt, pulled the nipple up, and offered it.

  “That doesn’t look safe,” a familiar voice said.

  Olivia looked around. Brian and Jodee were standing in the street watching her. “Jesus Christ, I was getting worried about you guys.”

  The little girl pulled on the water bottle. Olivia let go. “You keep it, honey.”

  Clutching the bottle, the girl hopped from one semi-stable spot to another and finally to the street. Jodee put his arms out to corral her, but she ducked past him and ran away, yelling, “Qetta, qetta!”

  Olivia climbed down with considerably more caution. Brian and Jodee reached toward her, but she jumped the last three feet to the ground without their help and brushed her hands off on her pants. Brian’s cotton shirt clung to his skin like wet rice paper. He held his arms open, and Olivia adroitly sidestepped him. Touching was part of Brian’s vocabulary, but Olivia wasn’t always in the mood for a language lesson.

  Brian stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I was worried about you, too,” he said.

  “You’re always worried about me.”

  “That’s because you’re always getting yourself into worrisome situations.”

  Olivia shrugged. “Comes with the job.”

  Jodee stood back, a half smile on his face. Olivia wrinkled her nose. Nice to know her antics amused him. Olivia had known Jodee for years, long before the current peace had stipulated that rebel fighters surrender their weapons. It was odd to see him without a gun. Stocky, balding, and middle-aged, he reminded her of her uncle Agata.

  “That kid . . .” Olivia said.

  “Somebody will pick her up,” Brian said. “The Red Cross has gotten pretty organized in the city.”

  Olivia looked down the street. The girl was almost out of sight.

  “You would never catch her,” Jodee said.

  Brian nodded. “If the Red Cross doesn’t pick her up, she’ll probably find her way to one of my water distribution stations. A lot of them do.”

  She turned to him. “More of your glass-half-full philosophy? That little girl doesn’t have a chance.”

  “I think Olivia’s glass is all the way empty,” Jodee said.

  Olivia rolled her eyes. “I’m realistic.”

  “Liv,” Brian said, “just because you can’t rescue everyone, that doesn’t mean you can’t rescue some of them.”

  Brian worked for a Portland-based NGO called Oregon Helps. At twenty-six, he was four years younger than Olivia, and—irrationally, in Olivia’s view—an optimist. They made an odd couple, not that Olivia thought of them as a couple exactly. Brian was tall and Nordic-looking, his eyes blue behind the lenses of wire-frame glasses. Olivia was five foot four and decidedly non-Nordic. Her father, a second-generation Greek American, had married likewise before moving to Seattle and opening his import business. After Olivia’s mother died, young, her dad married Rohana, an export agent from Jaipur.

  Brian hadn’t said the L-word yet, but she knew he was itching to spit it out, maybe while his fingertips traced calligraphy on her bare shoulder. Love of the adult variety had never happened to Olivia, but everything else had. She knew this colored her perception. Okay, maybe Brian wasn’t a pushy salesman but a charming one; either way, the result was the same: His damn foot was in the door.

  “If we’re going to the Old City,” Jodee said, scratching the black stubble on his jaw, “we need to go now. It will be dark in a few hours.”

  “We’re going.” Olivia pulled her scarf up and arranged a proper hijab. There was a story in the Old City—a bloody one—and she wanted it.

  * * *

  “Shameful,” Jodee said, pointing at a ragged gap in the stone archway.

  The Gate of Antioch stood as one of the oldest and best preserved of the nine original gates into the Old City. At least it had been, prior to the final year of the civil war.

  “Mortar attack,” Olivia said. The war had destroyed more important things than ancient architectural treasures. It had left a million dead. Three times that many driven away as refugees, flooding into Turkey and central Europe.

  Which is not to say the destruction of historical sites wasn’t bad, too—it was—and Jodee took it personally. Before the war, his business had arranged tours of the Old City and other ancient sites, and he had been a member of the Aleppo Preservation Corps. Jodee was fond of telling people that Aleppo was the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. But when Olivia first met him, Jodee Abadi had been leading a heavily armed band of fighters, part of a moderate Islamist alliance called the Asala wa el-Tanmiya Front. War changed people. Or revealed who they really were.

  A couple of bearded men in short-sleeved shirts loitered near the arch, watching them.

  Olivia shaded her eyes. “Who are those guys?”

  “I will find out.” Jodee looked sober. “Both of you wait here. And try not to look like journalists until I discover what they want.”

  “I’m not a journalist,” Brian said.

  “Tell Olivia not to be one, either.” Jodee walked toward the men.

  Brian wandered over to the collapsing remnants of a makeshift and abandoned souk. He put his hands on his hips and appraised the empty vendor stalls, nodding thoughtfully. Olivia joined him. A scent of cinnamon and cassia bark lingered, trapped under the rusty corrugated roof.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Olivia kept her voice low. She plucked her shirt away from her bra and flapped it, trying to generate a breeze underneath.

  “Pretending I’m a tourist.”

  “Uh, great idea. Except there aren’t any tourists.”

  “Liv?”

  “What?”

  “Would you call this one of your better ideas, coming here?”

  “I don’t have enough information to answer that.”

  Rumors persisted that a pro-Assad militia had recently used a fourteenth-century madrassa as a torture cell—the use of a school for this purpose managing to defile religion, education, and history at the same time. The war had ended, but not everyone was happy about coalition troops taking over. Assad supporters blamed the Free Syrian Army and its sympathizers for starting the whole thing. Discovering evidence of continued human rights violations on the part of the regime was a story Olivia very much wished to tell—and one Jodee Abadi very much wanted told.

  “When do you think you’ll have enough information?” Brian said.

  “You sure ask a lot of questions.”

  “Don’t you always say asking questions is good?”

  “Was that another question?”

  Jodee was talking to the bearded men. Olivia couldn’t tell whether or not it was going well. In Aleppo, it was always safest to assume it wasn’t. She put her hand on Brian’s arm, trying for a moment to adopt the part of his vocabulary largely missing in her. “Hey.”

  Brian raised his eyebrows.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  “Come on. What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Brian removed his glasses, wiped the lenses on his shirttail, and put them back on. Despite his wide-brimmed REI sunhat, his n
ose and neck were perpetually sunburned and peeling. He shed more skin than a snake. “You were going to tell me I should go back to the Green Zone.”

  “You should.”

  “Liv.”

  “But I’m not telling you to, because what would be the point, right?”

  “Right. Thanks for respecting my decision to not take the advice you didn’t offer.”

  She grinned briefly. “Really, Bri, you don’t have anything to prove.”

  “I know.”

  “What I said yesterday, it wasn’t important.”

  “You mean about how you thought I might not be up to dealing with all the shit that goes on around here, like you and your hard-nosed pals?”

  “I never said ‘hard-nosed.’”

  “Maybe not the actual words.”

  Jodee returned from speaking with the bearded men. Olivia pointed her chin in their direction. “What’s going on?”

  “They say it is not such a good day to visit the Old City.”

  “Why not?”

  Jodee shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That wasn’t a very productive conversation, was it?”

  “Not on the surface.” Jodee pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, as if checking himself for a fever. “It is very hot. Maybe we should not do this.”

  “It’s always hot. Just point out the madrassa. I’m good by myself after that. You and Brian can go back.”

  “We could all go back,” Brian said. “Right, Jodee?”

  Olivia wished Brian at least would return to the Green Zone. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Olivia was confident he was there trying to prove something that she had more or less prodded him into thinking he needed to prove.

  “By tomorrow there might not be any evidence left,” Olivia said. She looked away for a moment. “Bri, I have to see it now. It’s my job. But you—”

  “Don’t say it,” Brian said.

  She looked at Jodee. “Will those guys try to stop us?”

  “I do not think so. They like journalists.”

  Olivia squinted. “You told them?”